The Cost of War

This is disgusting.

The Department of Veterans Affairs scrapped an early effort to track returning war casualties because it was too expensive to implement, a senior official confirmed today before a congressional panel

Republican Party lead by President Bush wants to stay the course in Iraq without actually funding the war effort. Part of the war effort is making sure our injured military men and women are getting the best available healthcare. A top Republican in the House knew about the terrible conditions at Walter Reed and complained to Army, but this complaint fell on deaf ears.

Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-FL), former chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, stayed quite about Walter Reed. The reason is he did not want to embarrass the Republican White House during an election year.

It’s shameful. Under the leadership of President Bush, the Republican Party put GOP first over America and its troops.

It's the Reagan '80s

Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post has a must read op-ed about 'family values' Republicans.

As conservatives tell the tale, the decline of the American family, the rise in divorce rates, the number of children born out of wedlock all can be traced to the pernicious influence of one decade in American history: the '60s.

The conservatives are right that one decade, at least in its metaphoric significance, can encapsulate the causes for the family's decline. But they've misidentified the decade. It's not the permissive '60s. It's the Reagan '80s.

Conservatives economic policies lead by President Reagan and continued by President Bush has lead to the declined nuclear family. Without economic security of a steady job, healthcare and retirement benefits households will continue to fall apart.

And with each passing year, as their level of economic security declines, so does their entry into marriage.

Yet the very conservatives who marvel at the efficiency of our new, more mobile economy and extol the "flexibility" of our workforce decry the flexibility of the personal lives of American workers. The right-wing ideologues who have championed outsourcing, offshoring and union-busting, who have celebrated the same changes that have condemned American workers to lives of financial instability, piously lament the decline of family stability that has followed these economic changes as the night the day.

American conservatism is a house divided against itself. It applauds the radicalism of the economic changes of the past four decades -- the dismantling, say, of the American steel industry (and the job and income security that it once provided) in the cause of greater efficiency. It decries the decline of social and familial stability over that time -- the traditional, married working-class families, say, that once filled all those churches in the hills and hollows in what is now the smaller, post-working-class Pittsburgh.

Problem is, disperse a vibrant working-class community in America and you disperse the vibrant working-class family.

Which is how American conservatism became the primary author of the very social disorder that it routinely rails against, and that Republicans have the gall to run against.

Republicans are not the party of ‘family values’.

Conservative Spin

Media Matters has a helpful list of myths and falsehood to watch out for about the Libby’s guilty verdict.

No underlying crime was committed. Since a federal grand jury indicted Libby in October 2005, numerous media figures have stated that the nature of the charges against him prove that special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s investigation of the CIA leak case found that no underlying crime had been committed. But this assertion ignores Fitzgerald’s explanation that Libby’s obstructions prevented him — and the grand jury — from determining whether the alleged leak violated federal law.

There was no concerted White House effort to smear Wilson. In his October 2005 press conference announcing Libby’s indictment, Fitzgerald alleged that, in 2003, “multiple people in the White House” engaged in a “concerted action” to “discredit, punish, or seek revenge against” former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. In August 2006, it came to light that then-deputy secretary of State Richard Armitage was the original source for syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak’s July 14, 2003, column exposing CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. Numerous conservative media figures subsequently claimed that this revelation disproved the notion of a “concerted” White House effort to smear Wilson. But to the contrary, David Corn — Washington editor of The Nation and co-author of Hubris (Crown, 2006) the book that revealed Armitage’s role in the leak — noted on his Nation weblog that Armitage “abetted a White House campaign under way to undermine Wilson” and that whether he deliberately leaked Plame’s identity, “the public role is without question: senior White House aides wanted to use Valerie Wilson’s CIA employment against her husband.”

Libby was not responsible for the leak of Plame’s identity. Some in the media have suggested that because Libby did not discuss former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity with Novak — the first journalist to report she worked at the CIA — he is not technically responsible for the leak. But such claims ignore the fact that Libby discussed Plame’s CIA employment with then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller on several occasions prior to the publication of Novak’s column naming Plame as a CIA operative.

Libby’s leak was an effort to set the record straight. Critics of the CIA leak case have repeatedly claimed that the indictment stems from an effort by Libby and Vice President Dick Cheney to rebut a purportedly inaccurate attack on the administration by Wilson. According to these critics, Wilson falsely accused Cheney of having sent him to Niger to investigate reports that Iraq had attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium from the African country. In fact, Wilson, in his July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed, did not say he was sent by Cheney. Rather, Wilson wrote that it was “agency officials” from the CIA who “asked if I would travel to Niger” and “check out” a “particular intelligence report” that “Cheney’s office had questions about,” so that CIA officials “could provide a response to the vice president’s office.”

There is no evidence that the Plame leak compromised national security. Some media figures critical of the CIA leak case have attempted to downplay its significance by claiming that no evidence exists that the public disclosure of Plame’s identity compromised national security. In fact, news reports have indicated that the CIA believed the damage caused by the leak “was serious enough to warrant an investigation” and that the subsequent disclosure of Plame’s CIA front company likely put other agents’ work at risk. Further, Fitzgerald stated that Plame’s identity had been protected by the CIA “not just for the officer, but for the nation’s security.” And in their recently published book, Hubris, Corn and Newsweek investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff reported that, at the time of the leak, Plame was the chief of operations for the CIA’s Joint Task Force on Iraq, which “mount[ed] espionage operations to gather information on the WMD programs Iraq might have.”

Once a tobacco lobbyist, Always a tobacco lobbyist.

Republican tobacco-lobbyist-turned-Mississippi-governor Haley Barbour continues to work for tobacco industry.

The shoppers at the no-frills Brookshire’s supermarket — plate lunches $4.49, food stamps gladly accepted — have no doubt: swapping the nation’s highest state grocery tax for one of its lowest cigarette taxes is an excellent idea, and fie on the governor who opposes it. [..]

Up at the stately domed Mississippi Capitol, Gov. Haley Barbour, a former tobacco lobbyist, has other ideas. Studies, polls, protests at the Capitol, legislative sentiment and America’s highest cardiovascular disease rate notwithstanding, the governor of the poorest state is not budging, for the second year in a row: no cut in the 7 percent grocery tax and no increase in the 18-cents-a-pack third-lowest-in-the-nation, cigarette tax. [..]

And so it is that a bill to increase the cigarette tax to $1 a pack and cut the grocery tax in half overwhelmingly passed in the Mississippi House last month, remains bottled up in the State Senate Finance Committee, which is friendly to Mr. Barbour. Other poor states — Arkansas, South Carolina and Utah — have moved to cut their sales taxes on groceries. Not Mississippi.

Haley Barbour is another ‘family value’ Republican looking out for this client rather than for working families. This is a pattern. Conservatives will only choose their economic ideology over working people.

Jeff Gannon Redux

Another gay prostitute joins the ranks of the Conservative movement.

The link I posted is work office safe.